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We’re starting out on a long trip today, and we’ve decided to keep a photojournal on this blog site again in order to keep track of the quickly moving days. We will be doing a lot of moving around, so we cannot promise to keep things updated on a regular basis, but hopefully we will be able to get to it every few days.

With our gear on our backs, house sitters in place so the dogs would not be lonely, and itineraries somewhat ready and planned, we woke up and finished packing. My dad drove us to the airport Saturday morning (thanks, Dad!). We flew out of Windsor because for some reason flights to London/Paris were half the price when compared to flying out of Detroit (??).

Windsor Airport: Carrying everything we will need for 30 days

We arrived in Toronto and used our layover to walk around, grab dinner, and get tired. Our flight left around 10 pm. We did our best to sleep for the next 6 hours, but we landed at at Gatwick Airport totally exhausted. After a mix-up with our original travel plan out of Gatwick, we Uber-ed a car out to Salisbury. Salisbury is 85 miles out of London and is one of England’s cathedral cities.

First order of business: picking up the rental car. Here we were totally punked, and in our exhausted, half-awake state, we let the Enterprise Rent-a-Car guy tell us how “lucky” we were that we were being “upgraded” to a bigger car because the smaller cars were really popular and they were all rented earlier in the day. It wasn’t until we were in the car and freaking out on the half mile trip to the hotel that we remembered why we had rented a tiny car in the first place: roads are crazy small and narrow, and driving around a big car — and driving on the left for the first time — was terrifying. We drove past the hotel because obviously roads built prior to the 1200’s weren’t worried about wide vehicles and didn’t include parking spaces, turned hopelessly down a side street, then down another side street (really, it felt like being on a roller coaster that couldn’t stop), pulled over into the first open lane we saw, and miraculously entered a long-term city parking area . . . That looped around so we could see our hotel just passed a grocery store. How this happened, I have no idea. Honestly, we couldn’t have planned it better. A nice couple leaving the car park handed us their pass for the rest of the afternoon, and we were set until we left the next morning. Randomly finding that parking area was. Totally. A. Miracle.

The King’s Head Inn

We grabbed dinner at the hotel (fish & chips and some Tikki Masala to cover the important English foods) and then everyone went back to crash while I walked around for a while to scout out where we were in relation to the cathedral. I was soon rained out, so I also went back to sleep. It turned into an interesting night: Sleep 4 hours, get up and have tea and cookies for two hours, and sleep another four hours. In the girls’ room, Julia was also up in the middle of the night munching on almonds and weirding out Elizabeth’s dreams.